Transart is very excited to announce the first Transartfest taking place from July 27 to August 8, 2013 in Berlin with over a dozen workshops and seminars, a book launch, several concerts, a symposium, a film festival, speed critiques, several tours and a vernissage. Click here to go to the Transartfest website with full program, participant bios and event descriptions.

Call for Lens-based Artists to Submit Short Films

Transart is very excited to announce the first Transartfest taking place in the third week of the Transart residency in Berlin with over a dozen workshops and seminars, a book launch, several concerts, a symposium, a film festival, speed critiques, several tours and a vernissage. Click here to go to the Transartfest website with full program, participant bios and event descriptions.

Trans-ideology: Nostalgia

Trans-ideology: Nostalgia aims to show a selection of new video works from international artists that cover a wide range of ideas surrounding the concept of nostalgia. Fabio DaSilva and Jim Faught suggest in their article 'Nostalgia: A Sphere and Process of Contemporary Ideology' (1982) that nostalgia isolates and mythicises selected objects from the past so that we feel we are enjoying a more tranquil and conflictless past. This nostalgic past is somehow not completely the reality, rather, it is ambiguous and is purified. DaSilva and Faught indicate that the past is usually perceived as more tranquil than the present. The nostalgic past ignores real material conditions and tensions, and embraces an emotional utopia.

Nostalgia offers a comfort zone where we find a peaceful and conflictless past, and where we escape from the hectic and demanding real life in capitalist society. As nostalgia reduces our critical engagement with the past, history is not entirely real but is selected and mythical. Therefore, nostalgia is based on either dreamy and subjective views of the past, or fantasy about the future. The screening aims to show selected lens-based work which is created with the ideology of recalling the internal and utopian world of individuals – either a nostalgic past or a fantasised future.

First Prize: Full Tuition ($3250) Award

Full tuition of $3250 to Transart's Summer Certificate Program will be awarded as first prize to the best submission by the curator, Ming Turner. Second and third place will receive honorable mention.

How to Submit

1. Submissions must arrive by May 1, 2013.

2. Submissions will only be accepted on DVD.

3. Maximum length: 15 minutes (edits of longer works accepted).

4. Please include contact details, a short CV or biography, the details of the work, three still images and a statement (up to 300 words), all in English.